REST APIs make our lives easier – but we’re still in the dark ages when it comes to making our APIs general purpose, portable and reusable. Ben Busse shows us the common pitfalls of hand-coding custom REST APIs and the architectural advantages and technical characteristics of reusable REST APIs.

Standardisation, automated tasks and content negotiation – there are plenty of reasons to use REST for exposing data. Geertjan Wielenga shows us how to get started using NetBeans in a few easy steps.

JAXenter Editor Chris Mayer sat down with Les Hazlewood, co-founder and CTO of Stormpath, a firm who create user management and authentication systems for developers. We asked the Apache Shiro creator just why security is such a big problem for Java engineers and beyond.